Agricola (board game)

Last updated

Agricola
Agricola game.jpg
The box cover of Agricola
Designers Uwe Rosenberg
Publishers Mayfair Games
Lookout Games (Germany)
Z-Man Games (U.S.)
999 Games (Netherlands)
Homolúdicus (Spain)
Players1 to 5
Setup time5–10 minutes
Playing time30–60 minutes per player
ChanceLow (Cards)
Age range12 and up
Skills Economic management, Resource management, Strategic thought
Related games
Civilization, Dominant Species, Le Havre, Caylus, Caverna: The Cave Farmers
[1]

Agricola is a Euro-style board game created by Uwe Rosenberg. It is a worker placement game with a focus on resource management. In Agricola, players are farmers who sow, plow the fields, collect wood, build stables, buy animals, expand their farms and feed their families. After 14 rounds players calculate their score based on the size and prosperity of the household. [2]

Contents

The game was published by Lookout Games and released at Spiel 2007, where it was voted second-best game shown at the convention, according to the Fairplay in-show voting. [3] The game was released in English by Z-Man Games in July 2008. [4] Playdek released an iOS conversion of the game in June 2013. [5] A second edition of Agricola was published by Mayfair Games in May 2016. [6]

Agricola won the Spiel des Jahres special award for "Best complex game 2008" and the 2008 Deutscher Spiele Preis. [7] [8]

It was also the game that ended Puerto Rico's run of more than five years as the highest-rated game on the board game website BoardGameGeek, staying at the top of the rankings between September 2008 and March 2010. [9] As of September 2021, Agricola is ranked 49th among all board games on BoardGameGeek, with the revised edition being ranked 75th. [10]

A two-player version called Agricola: All Creatures Big & Small was released in 2012. There is also a corresponding iOS app. [11]

Gameplay

A game of Agricola being set up. This is the original version with round resource counters. Agricola board game.jpg
A game of Agricola being set up. This is the original version with round resource counters.

Players start the game with a farming couple living in a two-roomed hut. Each round, they take turns placing their family members in action spaces to get resources and improve and grow their households. [12] Only one family member can occupy each action space within the same round, so players need to time their actions to get maximum profit while denying progress to the opponents. [13]

The game is played in 14 rounds, divided by 6 harvests, occurring after rounds 4,7,9,11,13, and 14. [14] At each harvest, food is grown, people are fed, and animals multiply. [15] Players lose victory points if they have trouble feeding their family, which makes food production a major point of tension in the game. [13]

At the end of round 14 comes the final harvest after which victory points are counted. Scoring in Agricola rewards a middle-of-the-road strategy. Players are penalized for focusing on any one aspect of the game, and stop scoring in any area they focus on too much. The player with the most balanced and prosperous farm wins. [15]

Optional cards

To achieve variation between games, players are dealt a hand of optional cards – occupations and minor improvements. [16] Players get additional resources and various bonuses for playing these cards. They can also get an initial direction for their strategy, based on the occupations and improvements they were dealt. [15] Numerous expansion decks have been released to fill in gaps in gameplay and add thematic settings. [17] [18] [19] The game offers a simplified 'family' variation for less involved players, [20] in which occupation and minor improvement cards are not used. [21] [22]

Differences in the revised edition

Agricola: The Goodies set includes animal-shaped replacements for the basic coloured cubes Agricola animeeples (cattle and wild boar) (5650295714).jpg
Agricola: The Goodies set includes animal-shaped replacements for the basic coloured cubes

The original Agricola used multicolored wooden pieces of the same circular shape to denote various resources (clay, wood, reeds, etc.). The 2016 edition offered shaped wooden pieces for resources that make it easier to differentiate between the many types of resources. [6] The new edition also included fewer optional cards – two decks for a total of 96 cards (as opposed to three decks with 308 cards in the original edition). Some reviewers praised the balance of the new decks. [6] [23] The revised edition is a 1-4 player game, as opposed to the original version's player count of 1–5. However, there is a 5-6 player expansion for the revised edition.

Reimplementation

Rosenberg has reimplemented many mechanics from Agricola in later boardgames, in particular, Caverna (2013) and a two-player version Agricola: All Creatures Big & Small. [11] [15]

Awards

2009

2008

2007

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reiner Knizia</span> German board game designer

Reiner Knizia is a prolific German-style board game designer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Days of Wonder</span> Board game publisher

Days of Wonder is a board game publisher founded in 2002 and owned by Asmodee Group since 2014. Days of Wonder distributes its games to 25 countries. It specializes in German-style board games and has branched out to include some online games. Days of Wonder has published games in several languages including English, Dutch, French, German, Russian, and Greek. Days of Wonder was co-founded by Eric Hautemont, Mark Kaufmann and Yann Corno.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wolfgang Kramer</span> German board game designer (born 1942)

Wolfgang Kramer is a German board game designer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Queen Games</span> German board game publisher

Queen Games is a German publisher of tabletop games, based in Troisdorf and founded in 1992 by head Rajive Gupta, which specialises primarily in German-style, family-level games but has also published smaller numbers of both simpler, children's games and more complex, gamers' games.

Rüdiger Dorn is a German-style board game designer who is married and has three children. He lives in Pfofeld near Nuremberg.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Princes of Florence</span> Board game

The Princes of Florence is a German board game designed by Wolfgang Kramer and Richard Ulrich published in 2000 by Alea in German and by Rio Grande Games in English. Players assume the roles of Florentine Princes who wish to design their own villas to allow artists to create great works of prestige. Through seven rounds, each containing an auction phase and two action phases, the Princes pay for landscaping, buildings, freedoms, and various services and bonuses. At the end of the seven rounds, whoever has the most Prestige Points wins.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Uwe Rosenberg</span> German game designer

Uwe Rosenberg is a German game designer and the co-founder of Lookout Games. He initially became known for his card game Bohnanza, which was successful both in Germany and internationally. He is more recently known for developing many highly-acclaimed strategy games, such as Agricola and A Feast for Odin. As of March 2023, his games held six of the entries on BoardGameGeek.com's top-100 board games of all time.

<i>Dominion</i> (card game) Deck-building card game

Dominion is a card game created by Donald X. Vaccarino and published by Rio Grande Games. Originally published in 2008, it was the first deck-building game, and inspired a genre of games building on its central mechanic. Each player begins with a small deck of cards, which they improve by purchasing cards from a common supply that varies from game to game. Cards can help the player's deck function, impede their opponents, or provide victory points. As of December 2022, fifteen expansions to the original Dominion have been released.

Marrakech is a board game designed by Dominique Ehrhard in which players are competing carpet traders in the city of Marrakech. It was first published in 2007. Its German edition has been renamed Suleika.

<i>Yspahan</i>

Yspahan is a 2006 German-style board game by Sébastien Pauchon. It won the Meeples' Choice Award in 2006, came fourth in the 2007 Deutscher Spiele Preis, and was nominated for the 2007 Spiel des Jahres. It is named after Isfahan, and set in 1598, when it became the capital of the Safavid empire.

Hansa Teutonica is a German board game designed by Andreas Steding and published by Argentum Verlag in 2009. It placed in the top 10 at the Deutscher Spiele Preis.

This page lists board and card games, wargames, miniatures games, and tabletop role-playing games published in 2012. For video games, see 2012 in video gaming.

<i>Lords of Waterdeep</i> Board game

Lords of Waterdeep is a German-style board game designed by Peter Lee and Rodney Thompson and published by Wizards of the Coast in 2012. The game is set in Waterdeep, a fictional city in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting for the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. Players take the roles of the masked rulers of Waterdeep, deploying agents and hiring adventurers to complete quests and increase their influence over the city.

<i>Istanbul</i> (board game) Board game

Istanbul is a Euro-style board game designed by Rüdiger Dorn and illustrated by Andreas Resch and Hans-Georg Schneider, published in 2014 by Pegasus Spiele.

<i>Russian Railroads</i> German board game

Russian Railroads is a tile-based Euro-style board game for 2 to 4 players by Helmut Ohley and Leonhard Orgler. The game was published in 2013 by Hans im Glück Verlag. It is based on the worker placement principle, in which players can in turn distribute their available workforce in open fields in order to gain resources or other benefits. This gameplay is also used in other games of the publishing house, such as Stone Age or Egizia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Antoine Bauza</span> French game designer

Antoine Bauza is a French game designer. He designs board games, role-playing games and video games as well as being an author of children's books.

<i>Concept</i> (board game) 2013 board game

Concept is a deduction party board game released in 2013. The game was designed by Alain Rivollet and Gaëtan Beaujannot and published by Repos Production. It has collected multiple awards and nominations including the Jeu de l'Année prize in Cannes in 2014.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Love Letter (card game)</span> 2012 card game

Love Letter is a card game introduced in May 2012 and designed by Seiji Kanai. Its first English-language edition was produced in the United States by Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG) until 2018, when Love Letter was acquired by Z-Man Games.

Caverna: The Cave Farmers is a 2013 board game designed by Uwe Rosenberg. It is a complex worker placement strategy game that shares similarities in gameplay and theme with his earlier board game, Agricola, The game's theme revolves around helping a small dwarf family to settle a cave and nearby woodlands and to develop the setting through furnishing caves as well as converting forests into meadows, fields and pastures. Caverna received positive reviews from critics, two major expansions have also been released for the game.

References

  1. ↑ Goodridge, Michelle; Rohweder, Matthew J. (15 November 2021). Librarian's Guide to Games and Gamers: From Collection Development to Advisory Services. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN   9798216110958.
  2. ↑ "Best Eurogame: Agricola, Caverna, Puerto Rico or Terra Mystica?". Netivist. Retrieved 4 October 2015.
  3. ↑ "Boardgame News Convention Report". Boardgamenews.com. Archived from the original on 16 December 2008. Retrieved 6 August 2009.
  4. ↑ "Board Game Geek comments". Boardgamegeek.com. Retrieved 6 August 2009.
  5. ↑ "Playdek's Highly-anticipated Agricola Challenges Players to Build the Most Productive Farm; Plough, Sow and Reap Victory". Gamasutra. 13 June 2013. Retrieved 13 December 2013.
  6. 1 2 3 McDuffie, Tina (4 June 2016). "Agricola Revised Edition - How it compares to the original". The Glass Meeple. Retrieved 9 November 2016.
  7. ↑ Ducksch, Stefan (25 May 2008). "Spiel des Jahres 2008: Best complex game 2008 (German)". Spiel des Jahres. Archived from the original on 12 December 2008. Retrieved 6 August 2009.
  8. ↑ "Deutscher Spiele Preis 2008 (German)". Deutscher Spiele Preis. Archived from the original on 1 September 2009. Retrieved 6 August 2009.
  9. ↑ "BGG Top 50 Statistics". Board Game Geek. Retrieved 28 July 2014.
  10. ↑ "Browse Board Games". boardgamegeek.com. Retrieved 27 February 2019.
  11. 1 2 "Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small". boardgamegeek.com. Retrieved 12 December 2016.
  12. ↑ Temkin, Max. "Agricola". playtestblog.com. Retrieved 5 October 2015.
  13. 1 2 "Agricola – Mechanics and Tension". A Cardboard Empire. 12 May 2015. Retrieved 5 October 2015.
  14. ↑ "Agricola Board Game Review - Back To The Farm". The Board Gamer. 24 February 2023. Retrieved 23 April 2023.
  15. 1 2 3 4 Appelcline, Shannon (18 May 2015). "Anatomy of a Revision: Caverna". Mechanics & Meeples. Retrieved 5 October 2015.
  16. ↑ "Eurogames". martinfowler.com. Retrieved 5 October 2015.
  17. ↑ "Agricola: Gamers' Deck". boardgamegeek.com. Retrieved 20 November 2015.
  18. ↑ "Review: Agricola World Championship and NL Decks". GameHead. Archived from the original on 20 November 2015. Retrieved 20 November 2015.
  19. ↑ "Agricola Expansion: Belgium Deck". The Gamer Nerd. Archived from the original on 20 November 2015. Retrieved 20 November 2015.
  20. ↑ "Review: Agricola". Archived from the original on 6 October 2015. Retrieved 5 October 2015.
  21. ↑ "Game Publisher" (PDF). zmangames.com. Archived from the original (PDF) on 30 November 2010.
  22. ↑ Meyer, Benjamin. "Agricola Unofficial Rule Book" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 1 February 2017. Retrieved 5 October 2015.
  23. ↑ "Agricola: Revised Edition Review - Let Them Get Their Own Food!!". Broken Meeple. Archived from the original on 13 January 2018. Retrieved 12 January 2018.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.